🤝Meet Chris Myden. If that name sounds familiar, it’s probably because you’ve been subscribed to his flight-discount tracker, YYZ Deals, for longer than you can remember. Myden started the site 16 years ago to alert Canadian travellers of incredible flight deals. It’s still going strong, and Myden runs similar pages for deals in many other Canadian cities. We spoke to him about how he monetizes his work, flight pricing trends, and whether ultra-low fares are a thing of the past.
How did you get started?
It did start out as just a hobby. Back in those primitive times, it was really difficult to answer questions like, “What is currently the cheapest flight to Europe?” You literally had to make hundreds or thousands of individual searches to answer questions like this.
I was really interested in building things that helped me acquire and analyze airfare data, purely out of curiosity. While doing so, every now and then I would run across an unusually cheap airfare that I found to be really exciting. Very early on, I found a $100 roundtrip fare to a small island in Spain, Menorca, that about 12 friends also managed to get in on. From that point, I knew I was hooked and I decided to start a blog. Sometime around year two or three it had grown large enough to become my full-time job.
What’s your process for combing the internet for these deals? Has AI entered the picture for you?
Back when I first started I had to get creative about acquiring the data I was looking for, from, say, an online travel agency like Expedia or a meta-search site like Skyscanner.
But then these same websites noticed I was sending them traffic from the deals I found and they would contact me to say, "You know, we can just give you access via our API or backend." So then I started building more sophisticated scripts to process larger volumes of airfare data and help me analyze it. It used to take me a few weeks or a month to code something preliminary to work with an API and massage the data from it that I was looking for. Now, with AI, that process can take an afternoon or a few days.
How many “cheap” airfares are still genuine mistakes?
While deep discounts still occur, there are very few genuine mistake fares these days. ($100-$200 roundtrip to Europe was a typical example of a genuine mistake fare back in the day). I've always been honest and upfront about whether or not a fare is a mistake or not. Going back through my archives, I feel like the golden era of genuine mistake fares ended sometime around 2022/23.
This isn't to say they don't still occur. They do, but it's very rare now, and when they do, the airlines often won't honour them.
This is now your full-time job. How are you making money?
My websites have always had the typical banner ads. And if a deal is available through a meta-search site (like Skyscanner or Kayak) it's possible to earn affiliate commissions by sending traffic to them.
Over the years, I've often had people ask about turning it into a subscription service. I've been pretty fortunate to have a large enough audience that I don't feel the pressure to go down that road. I feel like if I did, there would be unnecessary pressure to provide deals that I don't feel excited about. You'll notice that sometimes you don't hear from me for a while. There can be stretches without anything interesting, and I would rather not intrude on your inbox with any mediocre deals.
Have you noticed any trends or patterns in the way airlines price their fares?
I have noticed different patterns in the last few years. For example, it used to be that an airline would occasionally drop the price of a certain route on a variety of dates throughout the next three-to-eight months and keep them low for, say 24-48 hours.
Now, what I'll often see them do is drop the price of a route on dates closer to (in the next one-to-four months) and make a smaller number of cheaper dates available, and then rotate through those cheaper dates quite frequently. But they'll keep a small number of cheaper dates within that month for an extended period of time.
With oil price uncertainty and many airlines tacking on fuel surcharges, have you seen major changes in airfare pricing?
The first half of 2026 was definitely a long dry spell for great deals. It wasn't always necessarily that prices were rising on a route (although that certainly was common) but sometimes it was just that a route never dropped in price, when it likely otherwise would have. Prices have loosened up a bit in the last few months and price drops have started to become a bit more frequent again.
What’s a favourite place you've travelled to?
Argentina is a country that checked a lot of boxes for me. The world's largest waterfall, Igazu, in the north and massive, beautiful glaciers in the south. Fantastic wine in Mendoza and Italian influenced food. World class hiking in Patagonia and out-of-this world Mars-like landscapes in the Salta and Jujuy provinces. And your dollar goes a long way there, but their currency can fluctuate wildly from year to year, so look into it first.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
